External Hard Drive Missing After Big Sur Download

So sorry, very disturbing and sad. I started a new thread on how to uninstall. No time until later in the week, will report. Problem: need to backup. Will the drive be recognized when I attempt this? Will see.

Can you delineate for the non-techies?

1) "Install Mac OS onto one external disk" Excuse my ignorance but WHICH MacOS? I hope I can intuite the rest and thanks for posting.

:How extraordinarily disappointing. It is obviously intentional. The lack of transparency re: what we were signing on for in doing this "update" (which is actually a downgrade) coupled with the unstated goals and motives by Apple is making me feel a little sick. Hoodwinked by an entity I actually trusted to "make things work". I fear for the music, art and graphics and more that ware entrusted to Time Machine and other back up ease products of the past. I dread hooking up my new HD to try and revert to Catalina - it probably will fail to mount and not be recognized. Certainly Seagate and others might be looking into this?

Same problem here. Big Sur 11.2.2, external drive is mounted, disc usage can be seen. No files can be access or visible under finder. Changing ports does not help. Highest Priority MacOS BUG. :( Please fix it.

ok, my problem solved. Apple does not like Microsoft, so they do not support proper NTFS file type management. In order to do that user needs to buy external software like, thanks god! Paragon Software NTFS For Mac: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Things that are free on Windows "must" cost on MacOS. ;(

I cannot believe this thread is not thousands strong! The number of quirks that I experience is legion. I do not need NTFS management? I only need Office to perform correctly, and it does not - all kinds of weird things happen, eg my spellcheck no longer works with one click. Seemingly minor, but for a writer a major annoyance. Little stuff like this adds up over time. Then all the time spent trying to correct it. Also it seems that the "helpful" button is disabled here? Why is that? Am I being paranoid. Seems Apple has no intention of fixing this and might be making it difficult to bump it up the chain?

The other thing is that this problem seems to vary in its effects from person to person, model to model. Then they had to send out a patch because Big Sur caused battery drains on some models! Battery drains??? Some people solve the external drive problem by switching a port - for others no such luck. Different fixes for different users? Need to use a PC to save your disk? It's outrageous.

after updating to Big Sur my external storage drives like my passport, WD and some flash drives are not recognized.

I erased Big Sur and then tried downloading Catalina and it would not load, so I had to reload Big Sur. There seems to be no solution, I just orders a device that will let me hook the external drives to my iPad hoping to recover videos and pictures of my recently deceased son. Apple really dropped the ball on this update!

Dropped the ball is putting it mildly. this situation deserves a good cursing out. It's awful to allow people to lose their work, let alone sentimental possessions. And they do not care. That's the worst part - no attempt to address the issue.

Anthony, have you looked at the threads on this topic? There are various things that have worked for people, but it seems as if there is no coherent solution across platforms - it's discouraging. Seems to be quite random, but perhaps one of them will work for you? Good luck.

Found Solution

go to support.wdc.com download the WD Drive Utilities for Mac, after a few minutes my external drive were recognized

The download states it compatible up to Mac Lion, but it works for Big Sur

uploading all pics and videos to iCloud, never going to depend on hardware again.

Thanks to everyone for helping, my son passed at age 38 and had over 300GB of videos and pics on the external hard drive,

Thankfully I download the WD Drive Utility and few minutes later I had access to my external hard drives. The last week after uploading Big Sur I really thought I lost all my sons videos and pic 300GB. My son recently died at age 38 and the thought of losing videos from birth to age 38 would of been disastrous

thanks you again.

PS Apple very disappointed this is the reason I switch from Microsoft to Apple in 2003. We should have the option to reload a previous version if we are not satisfied with new version

I cannot believe that we do not have the option to go back to Catalina. I have told ALL of my associates, freinds, colleague and people I meet about the terrible problems with Big Sur. That was my plan. Now I will have to take my machine to my tech specialist. There must be a work around.

Download the WD utilities Drive for Mac, it worked for me and only took as few minutes

go to support.wdc.com

Apple is getting like Microsoft, I started using Apple in 2003 after buying new computers with Microsoft and as soon as you turned it on there would be numerous updates

I am keeping my automatic update off!

This has been extremely painful.... Excessive forsure but this experience has been more then enough to turn me off from apple.. Which i have been with for 13+ years .... You have destroyed workflow for back to back days now... NO WORDS TO EXPRESS

It is incredible to me that Apple which is probably monitoring these discussions is in denial and have made no effort to address this issue and communicate with us that had these terrible experiences with downloading Big Sur. I basically lost all my data and had to buy a new external drive. I have spoken to Apple and have even submitted a written complaint. No one has come back to me with an explanation let alone an apology.